Bitcoin is tanking on Super Bowl Sunday – here's what happened

In just a few hours, the Patriots will take on the Eagles in Minnesota, but football fans who are also crypto traders will have something else on their minds besides the Super Bowl. It may be Sunday, but Bitcoin and all the other altcoins are all plummeting, on a combination of bad news from China and the US.

All the coins rallied on Friday, after another two-day bloodbath that saw Bitcoin falling below the $10,000 mark on Thursday, and dropping all the way to $7,700 soon after that. It looked like prices were on track to hit $10,000 again, as one Bitcoin traded for around $9,500 late on Friday and through Saturday. But those hopes were cut short on Sunday, as prices went down anywhere between 13% and 17%, to Thursday’s levels.

So what happened? Well, it looks like crypto traders, many of them already in panic mode after the bad news from Korea and India last week, were hit with more bad news.

News broke late on Friday that major US banks would not support crypto purchases. The list of financial institutions includes JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup. According to Bloomberg, these credit card issuers are halting purchases of Bitcoin and other cryptos on credit cards. Apparently, they do not want to deal with the risk associated with crypto trading.

That was just minor bad news that hardly dented the market. The big blows came from Asia on Sunday morning, CoinTelegraph explains.

China wants to further increase regulations in the country, Chinese-language site Sina reported quoting The Financial Times. After an initial ban on crypto exchanges and ICOs went into effect last September, some exchanges still operated from Hong Kong and Japan. But the Chinese government wants to ban access to all exchange platforms as well as ICOs in the future, whether they’re local or international, according to the report.

The South China Morning Post reported on Thursday that, like Facebook, China’s major social media networks and search engines had banned ads for Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies, and ICOs. China’s largest search engine Baidu, and the Twitter of China, Weibo, do not list any ads for the Chinese versions of the “Bitcoin,” “cryptocurrency,” and “ICO” keywords.

At the time of this writing, Bitcoin is currently trading at around $8,000, after dipping all the way down to $7,800 on some exchanges: